1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for determining system information from a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In certain instances, a software distributor or technical support agent may want to determine the configuration of a customer computer system. In the prior art, tailor made utilities are provided to determine system configuration information for particular uses. For instance, in the Unix** operating system, the “prtconf” command is used to print system configuration information, whose output includes the total amount of memory and the configuration of system peripherals formatted as a device tree.
Further, software vendors will sometimes query a customer's computer over a network to determine the system configuration for purposes of whether any upgrades or fixes for that system are available. For instance, Microsoft Corporation provides a Windows® update utility that is downloaded to the user's computer to scan the computer to determine whether any new version of installed components are available. The utility displays a list of recent versions of the determined components on the user's computer that the user can select to install.
Such prior art utility programs for determining system configuration information are designed for specific uses and not intended for general purpose queries of system information. For this reason, there is a need in the art for improved techniques for providing utilities to determine system information and to allow software vendors and others to configure such utilities for different purposes.